Groaning in Hama

A week ago I spent an afternoon in Hama in the hope of seeing how the city was recovering after several military blockades and attacks (for various security reasons I decided to hold off posting this until now). An afternoon is far too little time to accurately gauge the condition of a place but from what I could tell Hama has done remarkably well and many of its residents seemed cautiously optimistic.

The central clock tower – note the missing clock

I arrived in Hama by regular public transport. The road from Aleppo had already revealed evidence of what was happening in Syria’s central provinces. From Idlib down to Homs, the region has suffered the full brunt of Assad’s security forces. The bus passed dozens of tanks sitting in fields and amid olive groves, their long barrels pointing toward the road. The army had taken up residence in numerous half-built houses, turning them into observation posts and barracks. Machine guns jutted out from sandbag walls which had been placed around the bare concrete pillars. One or two tanks were usually parked outside.

Only a month ago, on the eve of Ramadan, tanks had entered Hama and were indiscriminately shelling residential neighbourhoods. Snipers on rooftops picked off anyone who dared venture out into the open, electricity was cut in several neighbourhoods, minarets were deliberately destroyed and, after only 5 days, an estimated total of 200 people had been killed.

At the bus station next to the ransacked police offices and bullet-ridden fast food joint we disembarked from the bus and caught a taxi into the centre. We passed anti-regime slogans graffitied on the cream coloured walls of houses which had subsequently been censored out by ugly swathes of black paint. The meter high letters ‘S.O.S.’, appeals for foreign intervention, were still clearly visible at several junctions and oddly enough hadn’t been painted over like the rest of the protest slogans. Perhaps the regime goons hadn’t understood their meaning.

While there were no longer any tanks in Hama, the military still maintains a heavy presence in the city. Bored-looking soldiers in tin helmets peer out over sandbag emplacements while checkpoints scrutinise the traffic passing in and out of the centre. The main roundabout which had previously hosted some of Syria’s largest ever protests, with hundreds of thousands gathering around the clock tower, was unsurprisingly now well guarded. I self-consciously took out my camera, doing my best to look like a happy tourist, and took a few pictures of the tower now devoid of its clock, a visible casualty of the unrest.

But despite this, Hama appeared much as it had a year ago when I first visited. Young girls in hijab congregated in the park’s shady spots and shabab clambered over the fences to get closer to Hama’s famous waterwheels, groaning loudly, as they have done for hundreds of years.